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Christmas Recipe: Gingerbread Men

December 19, 2023 12:39 IST

Gingerbread men

Photograph: Kind courtesy: Senior US Air Force Airman Elisa Labbe/Wikimedia Commons

When my daughters were small, no Christmas could go by without making Gingerbread Men cookies a few days before. The girls would participate wholeheartedly and zealously in the process, tickled with this Yuletide task.

We would make them in three sizes, including wee little boys, and decorate them with raisins, currants and tiny chopped pieces of cherries and dried green papaya peel. Decoration was, of course, the most thrilling part -- not that rolling them wasn't; little girls masterfully struggling with giant rolling pins as large as them -- and sometimes their friends would join.

Gingerbread men

Photograph: Kind courtesy: Orsotron/Wikimedia Commons

Since my younger daughter has her birthday in December, I would often include gingerbread men making as an activity at her birthday parties. And the kids loved this pastime, competing to make the prettiest dudes, and the waiting around, their excitement hardly contained, for the final product to emerge from the oven, as the fragrance of ginger and cinnamon hijacked the home.

Homemade gingerbread men taste far better than anything you can buy outside. And the process is the winning part.

 

We always baked and made a number of things together during the Christmas season like fudge, cereal snaps, Christmas cake, a gingerbread house, that was far more tricky and sometimes collapsed like a house of cards but could always be repaired. These rounds of baking were what made the loveliest Christmas memories.

Gingerbread men

Photograph: Kind courtesy: GutMaze/Wikimedia Commons

Gingerbread Men

Servings: 45-50

Ingredients

For decorating

Gingerbread making

IMAGE: My younger daughter making gingerbread men with Rita and Philo.Photograph: Zelda Pande

Method

ZELDA PANDE